I haven't blogged in ages, but I've been very busy... My real life has changed a lot since my last blog, I've got a new job, I've moved to a new home and last but not least, I've become a father of twin girls ( My wife and I already had a son, so it's a full house now ).

As I now have 3 kids, hosting the EuroNARPs in their old format was going to become a LOT more difficult. For every EuroNARP I had to be away from home for about 5 days, 2 days for setup and 3 days for the actual NARP. On top of that, my father wants to sell the little forest where Teh Lair^2 is located.

So, what's going on right now?In my new house, one of the main criteria was that it needed a basement to build a new location for Teh Lair. As you can see from the picture above, I managed to find a house with a brilliant basement. I did a little test-setup when we first moved into the house and wanted to go from there immediately, but fate had a whole different idea...

After a few weeks in the basement, we found out that there was a rather big problem... Whenever it rained hard for a few days, water would seep into the basement, if you want to build a huge room filled with electronics, water is the LAST thing you want in that room. So a full rebuild of the room is needed and we're on it! First we had to empty out the whole room.

I like building stuff, but to solve this issue, I needed some help from the pro's. So we had a professional company come in to build a new floor that would give the water the possibility to be pumped away. First they ground a few 'ditches' in the floor to give the water a route to get out the room to a pumping system.

after that they installed a special kind of plastic floor and filled it up with concrete.

the floor, drying out... With a nice and new floor, the walls had become a bit of an eyesore, so I decided to do a full-on rebuild with new walls, new electricity and everything else needed to make this damp old basement into the ULTIMATE NARP-location.

One of the plans made for the final layout, this was the idea, but reality has gotten in the way a bit, so the actual layout will be slightly different, but WAY better and a LOT more practical :-)

We started installing a few extra electricity circuits, as you'll see later on, these few are escalating to a LOT more, just to be sure we have enough POWAAAH for the future, but this was the actual start of the rebuild.

My favourite material to work with is wood, so I bought a huge load of plywood and beams to build a completely new set of walls.

It took a lot longer then expected ( real life is a bitch ), but after a few weeks, a full frame was finally mounted on the walls, ready to have the plywood mounted!

Here you can see me mounting the plywood.

All the existing pipes, lightswitches and power provisions need to be accessible, so we had to adjust every piece of plywood for them, as you can probably imagine, this was a lot of work, in the pic you can see Strikeman going at it with a passion ( and a saw ).

After 2 days of hard work ( and a quick trip to the LEGO-store ), 90% of the walls was done.

The pile of plywood is a lot smaller now:

I'm now building some of the smaller parts, like a box for the pumping system.

During the mounting of the walls, we ( Strikeman & I ) have decided to add more electricity circuits, so I'm doing this now with the help of DenBelg.

So far it looks like we'll be adding 7 electricity-circuits in total.

The Future!Once again, Real Life invaded, I had some issues with one of my toes which were handled by a doctor, but for about a week I've been unable to wear any socks or shoes, hopefully I'll be able to continue next week.